The Metaphysics of Legal Thought in the Early Modern Period: Lawyers in Witch Trials

During the period from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, Europe witnessed intense political and legal activity associated with the prosecution of the irrational crime of witchcraft. Beginning in the eighteenth century, European intellectual elites came to the conclusion that witches had never existed and that the alleged crimes attributed to them were a legal fiction, the product of medieval superstition and popular fanaticism, sustained by ignorant or malicious judges. The matter thus seemed closed, and discussions of trials of witches and sorcerers were thereafter often passed over in embarrassed silence, including in scholarly research. This proved to be a serious mistake, since this socio-cultural phenomenon, closely connected with political, economic, religious, mythological, legal, and other dimensions, cannot be removed from the broader picture of the emergence and development of the state and law without distortion. Fears, superstitions, and other beliefs, even as forms of the collective imaginary, serve as a foundation for the formation of legal consciousness, legal culture, and the legal system. Accordingly, the study of such socio-legal practices makes it possible to investigate more deeply the dynamics of political and legal development in early modern Europe and the «long eighteenth century» (in the unofficial terminology reflecting the rise of the modern state and the rationalization of thought). The research task posed by the author may be understood as the rationalization of approaches to the study of irrational practices and the identification of clearer criteria marking the frontier between scientific and pseudoscientific activity in legal-historical and historical scholarship. The purpose of this study is to identify the rational component of the legal thinking of the jurists who took part in such proceedings, as well as the rational foundations of the criminal trials in which witchcraft was adjudicated. In the future, this may serve as a solid foundation for specialists in the history of state and law and in comparative law. Recognition that these law-enforcement practices were not marginal phenomena will make it possible to develop scholarly fields similar to witchcraft studies, which have placed witchcraft in a broader social context, separating it from the notion of mere ignorance unworthy of study. Within the framework of such a methodological approach as comparative law, new horizons open up for research in the theory and history of the state and law of Russia, which determines the relevance of the present study.

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